Loved this! Abused heroine gets her HEA with lots groveling and support and healing from the hero. Right up my alley. ( )

Loved this! Abused heroine gets her HEA with lots groveling and support and healing from the hero. Right up my alley. ( )

5 it hurts so good stars

OMG this book ripped my heart out. It was a wonderful painful road to HEA. ( )

I heard about this book from Grace Burrowes, and would have gotten it on her word alone, but I thought to ‘sample’ a couple of paragraphs from Amazon, just to get a ‘feel’ of the story. What I got was a kick in my solar plexus as the novel opens up with the letter in question.

Most stories are structured in three parts, with a climax at the end. This story had its climax right at front, and with it made you want to demand to know what in the hell happened and how the hell is our hero going to make it all right.

When many authors would keep the said ‘letter’ as an intriguing ‘pièce de résistance’ for the climactic ending, this author smacks you with it right at the beginning, and I dare you not to flinch at it!

What I also loved about the story is that while it had serious, dark and painful moments, the author made sure to lighten it up with some witty dialogue and a hero that never left his home without ‘having a plan’.

“Listen. I have a plan.” – is soon becoming my favorite line I’ve ever read in a novel! Every time I read it as our hero said it, and let me tell you, it was many, many times as the poor fellows plans kept changing from day-to-day, I laughed out loud, even though, I’d be bawling over a page before.

I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this tale! It is filled with so many wonderful, heartbreaking and funny moments it warmed me all over. This is a story of true love gone awry, thought dead, never to be resurrected from the ashes of malice and hate; story of redemption, of second chances; of unspeakable abuse, of survival; of the ‘warrior woman’ and the man who never could forget her; a story of hope that there are ‘windows in hell’ so that the evil can see love triumph and thrive.

Can you tell I liked the book? I don’t usually include excerpts in my reviews, but I’m making an exception this time, and here is what grabbed my attention…and held it throughout the entire tale:

http://bookworm2bookworm.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/the-letter-by-sandra-owens/

Melanie for b2b

*Amazon purchase ( )

Not sure where I picked this up, I suspect it was a kindle freebie. In any case, having recently started wandering around in historical romancelandia (with somewhat hit and miss results), and since it had such rave reviews, I gave it a read.

Good grief do I regret that.

This book opens with a letter from a villain (clearly twirling his mustache and cackling to himself in glee) to the supposed hero, detailing a decade of abuse heaped upon the woman the "hero" was to have married and her child. It does not improve from there one little bit.

Right off the top of my head issues:
- When the best character in a romance novel is a three legged cat who falls over a lot, and an imaginary bunny, the book is in trouble. When those characters don't even show up until the last few chapters, trouble doesn't even begin to describe it.
- The child is supposedly 10 years old, speaks like a 14 year old, and acts like a 4 year old. I think it's supposed to be cute, it's not.
- There is another woman, clearly also a victim of a hinky relationship, although that's not apparent until late in the book. The heroine notices this, unlike anyone else, and offers some support and the "hero" (yes I'm going to scare-quote that every single time) tells her to butt the hell out. What a prince Duke.
- Fairly near the end, the "hero" at one point laments that the ten years of sadistic abuse has "cost him his chance at an obedient wife." If it had been a paperback, it would have gotten thrown at the wall at that point.

I could probably come up with a bunch more completely off the wall reasons to intensely dislike this book, but I honestly don't want to think about it anymore. In any case, I was considering how to write this review, when I discovered someone had more or less written it for me, so go boogenhagen's review for a more in-depth and only slightly less disgusted discussion of it's many failures. ( )